A Greek deal has been pulled from the fire at the last moment. The country’s bailout programme will be extended for four months averting a potential cash crunch in March that could have forced the country out of the currency area.

Breaking news is S&P’s downgrade of France’s credit rating to AA from AA+ putting it two notches below Germany. Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has rushed out to declare French debt is among the safest and most liquid in the euro zone, which is true.

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Spanish government bonds have had a good run since the European Central Bank said it would protect the euro last year. But some analysts say the threat of a rating downgrade to junk remains an important risk.

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Moody’s refrained from cutting Spain’s sovereign rating to junk territory last week, easing immediate fears that Spanish bonds could become vulnerable to forced selling if they fell out of benchmark indices, tracked by bond funds, as a result of the grade reduction.

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Italy is expected to pay slightly more than it did a month ago to borrow for three years at today’s auction of up to 6 billion euros of a range of bonds. Yields edged up at a sale of 11 billion euros of short-term paper on Wednesday but there is no immediate cause for alarm. Three year-yields have dropped from 5.3 percent to around 3.3 since the ECB declared its readiness to buy the bonds of troubled euro zone sovereigns and Italy has shifted about 80 percent of its debt requirements this year, so is on track in that regard.

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Reporting for this post was done by the U.S. markets team in New York.

A number of Wall Street analysts have reacted to the historic downgrade of the U.S. AAA rating on Friday evening with a shrug. Some argue the ratings firm’s warnings about the U.S. debt deal offered an early signal, while others dismissed the action, questioning the company’s record of giving AAA ratings to housing assets that turned out to be toxic.

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A potential downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by a credit ratings agency, once seen as impossible for the world’s largest economy, could resound in financial markets more with a whimper than a bang. That’s because, as was evident in a Reuters poll, investors have largely come to expect it.